At last, seventeen days after the first snows, the edges of the herds began to reach their winter pastures far north of Turia, approaching the equator from the south. Here the snow was little more than a frost that melted in the after- noon sun, and the grass was live and nourishing. Still farther north, another hundred pasangs, there was no snow and the peoples began to sing and once more dance about their fires of bask dung.
"The bask are safe," Kamchak had said. I had seen strong men leap from the back of the kaiila and, on their knees, tears in their eyes, kiss the green, living grass. "The bosk are safe," they had cried, and the cry had been taken up by the women and carried from wagon to wagon, "IT he bosk are safer"
This year, perhaps because it was the Omen Year, the Wagon Peoples did not advance farther north than was necessary to ensure the welfare of the herds. They did not, in fact, even cross the western Cartius, far from cities, which they often do, swimming the bask and kaiila, floating the wagons, the men often crossing on the backs of the seam, ming bask. It was the Omen Year, and not a year, apparently, in which to risk war with far peoples, particularly not those? Of cities like Ar, whose warriors had mastered the tarn and' might, from the air, have wrought great destruction on the herds and wagons The Wintering was not unpleasant, although, even so far north, the days and nights were often quite chilly; the Wagon Peoples and their slaves as well, wore boskhide and furs during this time; both male and female, slave or free, wore furred boots and trousers, coats and the flopping, ear-flapped caps that tied under the chin; in this time there was often no way to mark the distinction between the free woman and the slave girl, save that the hair of the latter must needs be unbound; in some cases, of course, the Turian collar was visible, if worn on the outside of the coat, usually under the furred collar; the men, too, free and slave, were dressed similarly, save that the Kajiri, or he-slaves, wore shackles, usually with a run of about a foot of chain.
On the back of the kaiila, the black lance in hand, bending down in the saddle, I raced past a wooden wand fixed in the earth, on the top of which was placed a dried tospit, a small, wrinkled, yellowish-white peachlike fruit, about the size of a plum, which grows on the tospit bush, patches of which are indigenous to the drier valleys of the western Cartius. They are bitter but edible.
"Well done!" cried Kamchak as he saw the tospit, unsplit, impaled halfway down the shaft of the lance, stopped only by my fist and the retaining strap.
Such a thrust was worth two points for us.
I heard Elizabeth Cardwell's cry of joy as she leaped into the air, clumsy in the furs, clapping her hands. She carried, on a strap around her neck, a sack of tospits. I looked at her and smiled. Her face was vital and flushed with excitement. "Tospit!" called Conrad of the Kassars, the Blood People, and the girl hastened to set another fruit on the wand. There was a thunder of kaiila paws on the worn turf and Conrad, with his red lance, nipped the tospit neatly from the tip of the wand, the lance point barely passing into it, he having drawn back at the last instant.
"Well done!" I called to him. My own thrust had been full thrust, accurate enough but rather heavily done, in war, such a thrust might have lost me the lance, leaving it in the _ 60 body of an enemy. His thrust was clearly, I acknowledged, worth three points.
Kamchak then rode, and he, like Conrad of the Kassars, deftly took the fruit from the wand; indeed, his lance enter- ing the fruit perhaps a fraction of an inch less than had Conrad's. It was, however, also a three-point thrust. The warrior who then rode with Conrad thundered down the lane in the turf.
There was a cry of disappointment, as the lance tip sheared the fruit, not retaining it, knocking it from the wand. It was only a one-point thrust.
Elizabeth cried out again, with pleasure, for she was of the wagon of Kamchak and Tarl Cabot.
The rider who had made the unsatisfactory thrust suddenly whirled the kaiila toward the girl, and she fell to her knees, realizing she should not have revealed her pleasure at his failure, putting her head to the grass. I tensed, but Kamchak laughed, and held me back. The rider's kaiila was now rearing over the girl, and he brought the beast to rest. With the tip of his lance, stained with the tospit fruit, he cut the strap that held the cap on her head, and then brushed the cap off; then, delicately, with its tip, he lifted her chin that she might look at him.
"Forgive me, Master," said Elizabeth Cardwell.
Slave girls, on Gor, address all free men as master, though, of course, only one such would be her true master. I was pleased with how well, in the past months, Elizabeth had done with the language. Of course, Kamchak had rented three Turian girls, slaves, to train her; they had done so, binding her wrists and leading her about the wagons, teaching her the words for things, beating her with switches when she made mistakes; Elizabeth had learned quickly. She was an intelligent girl.
It had been hard for Elizabeth Cardwell, particularly the first weeks. It is not an easy transition to make, that from a bright, lovely young secretary in a pleasant, fluorescently lit, air-conditioned office on Madison Avenue in New to a slave girl in the wagon of Tuchuk warrior.
When her interrogation had been completed, and she had collapsed on the dais of Kutaituchik, crying out in misery "La Kajira. La Kajira!" Kamchak had folded her, still weep- ing, clad in the Sirik, in the richness of the pelt of the red tart in which she had originally been placed before us. As I had followed him from the dais I had seen Kutaituchik, the interview ended, absently reaching into the small golden box of kanda strings, his eyes slowly beginning to close.